Enclosure, Glanakip, Co. Cork

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Enclosures

Enclosure, Glanakip, Co. Cork

In the forestry plantation at Glanakip, on a north-facing slope in County Cork, there is a circular enclosure that almost nobody has seen in person for a very long time.

It does not appear on modern maps, it cannot be reached through the dense afforestation that now covers the ground, and the only documentary evidence that it ever existed is a single cartographic snapshot from 1842.

The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of that year recorded the site using hachures, the small radiating lines that nineteenth-century cartographers used to indicate raised or defined earthworks. A hachured circular enclosure on such a map typically suggests a ringfort or similar enclosed settlement, the kind of earthen or stone boundary that farmers and families in early medieval Ireland built around their homesteads. Whether the Glanakip example was ever substantial enough to interpret with confidence is now difficult to say. The trees planted over and around it in the decades since have made any ground-level inspection effectively impossible, and no subsequent mapping has picked it up again. It exists, for practical purposes, only in that one nineteenth-century survey.

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Pete F
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